I just took a look at Sam Harris’s now-slightly-infamous TED talk (above), and had a little flick through a subsequent piece in the Huffington Post, and was rather interested in what he had to say. Interested, because I had thought it was the cast-iron consensus among educated peoples to speak of morality in relative terms, or at the very most to concede that it is such a difficult subject that we can’t reasonably hope to get to the bottom of it. Even if this were the correct view, I have always thought it a somewhat frustrating one—if you cannot prove you are right, on what basis can you assert that you are right? Clearly, relativists must think this too, but opt for a different route at the fork.

Harris’s thesis is similar to one I very vaguely formulated myself a little while back, and centres around the idea of mental states. He asserts that there are—to put it crudely—good mental states and bad mental states. A good moral action, then, is one that results in a good moral state. Clearly, this is not an assertion that can be made without much qualification, and he goes to great pains to do so. Mapping out all possible states would be a gargantuan, and probably impossible, task. If it is impossible, it will be because there are literally an infinite number of possible distinguishable states. Eating ice cream while at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street on a sunny day produces a different state than doing the same thing at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 33rd on the same day, even if both are pleasurable.

If we imagine a “family tree” of possible mental states, such that each state requires for its achievement some combination of having experienced certain other states and a certain “brain structure”, we might get some idea of the possibilities of experience. Such a family tree can be asserted without any recourse to morality at all: it’s just a scientifically described set of possible experiences. No single one of these mental states could be equated with happiness, but rather there will be a certain set (perhaps infinitely large) of states that all belong to the group “happiness”, and there will be certain common features of this group such that if a new member were to be discovered, it could be easily identified as such. Most importantly, we may also be able to assert (and this can in principle be empirically tested) that a certain mental state, or more precisely a certain set of mental states (e.g. happiness or regret) may be out of reach for a certain person with a certain brain structure. Such an assertion would provide an obvious way to deal with an obvious objection—the objection being, “what if a madman finds contentment in evil deeds?”; the retort being, “madmen are incapable in principle of being content”.

Clearly, the origins of our potential for behaving morally—our empathy, our sense that all humanity is fundamentally the same, and our reason—arise from the complex tale of our evolutionary past. With this in mind, it seems to me that if we intend to draw the family tree of sets of possible mental states, we can only then assert with some measure of impartiality the superiority of one state over another if we understand their origins. So we can say that mental state Z439126H, which is a member of the “happiness” set (which in turn we can give a completely nondescript name so that its appellation provokes no controversy), arises because the circumstances that attend it are good for the survival of the genes that make up Homo sapiens. Similarly, we can say that mental state Y129087A, which corresponds to the feeling that a madman gets on committing a particular evil deed, is not connected with a state of affairs that promotes the survival of the genes of Homo sapiens. So we can claim that Z439126H is superior to Y129087A from the evolutionary perspective.

This leads us into an apparent conundrum, because there is no obvious reason to say that the evolutionary foundation is a good one for morality. But there are many assumptions which we make in ordinary life, which we all agree on, and which none of us feels the need to justify. We all agree that the proverbial table and chair exist, and it would be silly to have to prove this in order to prove some larger point. However, the evolutionary foundation is not so experientially self-evident as the existence of solid objects. Even if most reasonable people believe that we are the product of evolution, nevertheless it has not yet been proven beyond doubt that evolution has conspired to make us moral.

Perhaps the most we can ever say, then, is that the general survival of the species is the fountain from which all our behaviours spring. When our instincts do not work to this end (even in some indirect way), then there is something functionally wrong with them. Now it might be objected that from this point of view there is nothing really wrong with killing one person, since this is pretty negligible compared to the six billion people on earth. However, if we were not repulsed by murder, this would mean that our own gene-preserving instincts would be diminished, and humanity would be slightly the worse for it.

Sam Harris has made a bold first step in producing the case for a science of morality. But people have not yet converted en masse, and that is largely because such a science is in its very inchoate stages. In the near future, the instruments currently at our disposal will seem positively blunt, and we may well be able to talk in vastly more precise terms than we can now. At the moment, an objective morality only feels like a safe bet, but it cannot yet be asserted without very reasonable arguments to the contrary.

It is easy, and probably true, to talk of Shakespeare and Cervantes and Michelangelo and Mozart as creators of timeless art. It is certainly true that we still appreciate them now, and that that appreciation is not so much dependent on any historical fascination they might hold, but on their intrinsic merits, which speak to us just as powerfully as they ever did—and indeed which invite constant streams of new and inventive interpretations and understandings.

However, it’s also true that this idea of timelessness can all too easily become mythologized and metaphysicised, and their creators nearly deified as a result. Since most of us mere mortals are incapable of properly grasping why exactly it is that they have stood so solidly against the ravages of time, we are inclined to feel that these great artists spend only half their time here on earth, and the other with the gods on Mount Olympus, privy to some higher knowledge always and eternally beyond our reach. We imagine that the spans of time that have tested these works are long. One hundred years, some say, is the amount of time beyond which one can easily say, “this is a classic, and this is not.” But what about in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years? Will Shakespeare still be revered then?

It seems likely, if only because even if writers eventually surmount him, that is no reason for his work to be considered of lesser value. Shakespeare superseded Chaucer, but we still read the latter. But what about in millions of years?

An interesting fact about literature that sets it apart from other mediums is that it rests upon a pretty arbitrary foundation stone—language. Almost all classics are considerably weakened in translation. Although there are great translations that rival the originals, it is safe to say that to fully appreciate a great work of literature, you have to read it in the original language. But no language lasts forever. Even though it is likely that English, for instance, will survive a few more centuries, and even if it undergoes less change than it did over the past 1,000 years, it can only survive if the geopolitical situation of the world doesn’t drastically change. It is not even possible to say that that will be the case in a hundred years’ time, let alone a thousand. It may be a cliché to say, but if China continues its rise to world domination, Mandarin may take the place of English as the world’s most spoken language, and English may eventually become a minority and thus become extinct. It may even be replaced with “Panglish”, a variant of English that contains so many international contributions as to be virtually unrecognisable.

You might object, of course, that hardly anyone apart from classical scholars speaks Ancient Greek nowadays, and yet the works of Sophocles still survive, and are still loved. That will probably become the situation with Shakespeare soon enough, as it already is with Chaucer. But we are still relatively close in time to the Ancient Greeks. It is still quite easy to see their cultural influence upon us, and therefore it makes sense that people should want to learn Ancient Greek. But will this still be the case in hundreds of thousands of years? It’s quite possible, but it seems that the further away we get from Ancient Greece, the less likely it will be.

Can we truly say that something is timeless if it rests on such an arbitrary foundation as language? We probably can, but only if we say that language itself is not arbitrary, it is only individual languages that are. Instead of thinking of Shakespeare’s works as he wrote them as the “original Shakespeare”, perhaps it is more useful to think of them as translations of Shakespeare—the best ones available, but translations nonetheless. All writers struggle to formulate the words to best express what they want to say, so in that sense when Shakespeare wrote he was only translating into English the thoughts that he and his characters had.

But there is another, perhaps more serious objection to the idea that a work of literature (or art generally) can be timeless. Our appreciation of art depends on human nature being as it is. But what if it were to change significantly?

This is a question that would undoubtedly baffle even the greatest of evolutionary biologists. Is it even possible to assert that, no matter how much we might change, there may still be some crucial aspects of our nature that will never go? It seems hard to imagine, for instance, that we will become less intelligent. The converse is not true, either: it’s not obvious that we will become so much more intelligent, because we don’t all choose partners solely based on their cognitive faculties. So while it is not obvious that we will become more intelligent, it seems unlikely that we will become less intelligent, and virtually impossible to conceive that we will become so much less intelligent that we are unrecognisable as humans.

Suppose we become considerably more intelligent. Imagine a world where each of us could individually prove the Riemann hypothesis in five minutes at the age of two. Would Shakespeare eventually seem backward? It’s quite possible, but in any case rather difficult for such a backward homo sapiens as myself to contemplate. Some might recoil at the image conjured, and picture a lifeless society where such things as love don’t exist. But there is no logical reason to think so. After all, emotions exist for a very good reason. Indeed, they must be more important to the continuation of human life than intelligence, because even if we were all born with full knowledge and understanding of the fact that we must procreate, from whence would come our inclination to do so?

To imagine that the appreciation of Shakespeare is a solely cognitive task is to wildly swerve from the truth. Shakespeare’s plays are intelligent, but they do not require the mental effort that quantum mechanics asks of us, and in any case there are playwrights like Beckett and Pirandello who are arguably more sophisticated, at least in a non-dramatic, conceptual sort of way, than Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s brilliance (as well as that of other writers at his level) is in his insightful portrayals of the lives of people. Even if we become more intelligent, would our lives become significantly different that these portrayals, as insightful as they are, might just become fascinating relics and records of a period in our evolutionary history?

It is, perhaps, impossible to say. For all that we might speculate, there are countless ways that the human species might evolve, and it’s difficult to tell whether any one of them will have a significant effect on our relationship with art. But perhaps it is fair to say that our instinct tells us that we won’t change so dramatically. When we look at our relatives in the animal kingdom, we are fascinated not just by the ever-surprising variety of nature, but also by the similarity to ourselves. For the most part they do not experience the pain and pleasure of their existence like we do, yet there is a sense in which, that one difference aside, their lives are fundamentally the same as our own. So perhaps timeless art is not just timeless for human beings, but for all equivalently intelligent animals? Or perhaps that’s just something that someone in the infancy of his species’ evolution would say.